Policy Enforcement and Monitoring

Of the ten suggestions just
mentioned, policy enforcement and monitoring are particularly
fundamental to SOA and cloud governance. IT can deploy a single entity,
the virtual Policy Enforcement Point (PEP), to accomplish both tasks.
Policy enforcement technology for clouds can create secure, managed
communications between legacy applications in the enterprise and new
applications residing in the cloud.

Policy is not just a way of
articulating and enforcing security requirements; it is the integration
glue between systems. A rich policy language meets the demands of
business and IT, offering both high-level contracts such as SLAs and
billing, as well as low-level details such as dynamic routing, failover
and data transformation.

Deploying virtualized, distributed
policy enforcement points in front of cloud applications allows
organizations to protect and manage their services. Application-level
policy enforcement gives fine-grained access control and in-depth
understanding of use patterns of actual services, instead of virtual
machines. Not only does this protect data and applications from
unauthorized use, it ensures that the distribution of requests to
virtualized application instances is properly managed.

In conclusion, governance-whether
applied to the corporate, IT, SOA or cloud space-is about vision,
oversight and control within a domain. Much of governance is about
people working within a process; it's behavioral rather than a product.
However, technology plays a critical role as an enablement tool to
control, monitor and adapt-the three pillars of any operational
governance program. Entities considering a move to the cloud would do
well to examine closely both their technology and processes in order to
take advantage of the promise and avoid the peril of the cloud.

K. Scott Morrison is VP of Engineering and Chief Architect at Layer 7 Technologies. He
has extensive technical and scientific experience in a number of
industries and universities, including senior architect positions at
IBM. He has published more than 50 book chapters, articles and papers.
He is co-author of the upcoming university textbook, "Cloud Computing:
Principles, Systems and Applications" (to be published by
Springer-Verlag). He has spoken at 70 shows around the world. He
holds a Bachelor of Computer Science degree (honors) from Simon Fraser
University. He can be reached at smorrison@layer7tech.com.

K. Scott Morrison is VP of Engineering and Chief Architect at Layer 7 Technologies. He has extensive technical and scientific experience in a number of industries and universities, including senior architect positions at IBM. He has published more than 50 book chapters, articles and papers. He is co-author of the upcoming university textbook, "Cloud Computing: Principles, Systems and Applications" to be published by Springer-Verlag. He has spoken at 70 shows around the world. He holds a Bachelor of Computer Science degree (honors) from Simon Fraser University. He can be reached at smorrison@layer7tech.com.